Futureproofing Health: Developing a Center for Climate-Resilient Health in Disasters

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ABSTRACT: Community Engagement Core The goal of the Community Engagement Core (CEC) of the Center for Climate and Health glObal Research on Disasters (CORD) is to establish collaborations for action-oriented research among affected communities, humanitarian practitioners, and policymakers in order to mitigate health effects of climate-related disasters. Through its 7 participating universities, CORD will engage with practitioners, policymakers, and community members to reduce the health impacts of climate-related disasters in marginalized communities at greatest risk around the world. The CEC will support the case studies of the Research Project Core to promote and enable the engagement of the target communities, their policymakers and humanitarian practitioners in shaping relevant research questions, co-designing the research methods to ensure appropriateness and precision, collaborating on the analysis of results, and designing and implementing the dissemination and uptake process. The central hypothesis is that meaningful community engagement in all aspects of the research process will result in relevant research outcomes that are used to inform decisions that prevent and/or mitigate health impacts of climate-related disasters. Aim CEC1 is to use community-engaged principles within the research projects to establish creative multi- directional communication with communities affected by, or at risk of, health impacts from climate extremes. It will conduct a capacity assessment within the consortium on community-engaged research (CEr), develop and implement an internal capacity-building plan for CEr, and finally implement tailored CEr approaches for each case study in the Research Project. Aim CEC 2 is to establish bi-directional communication and close collaboration with governments and named partners in the humanitarian sector to identify research questions, research design, and reporting/application of results. Aim CEC3 is to develop innovative tools to translate scientific findings of CORD for use by the public, policymakers, and practitioners. It will build CORD capacity to create innovative tools and pilot test innovative engagement techniques. Successful development of the CEC will support the overall goals of CORD and help ensure that the information it produces about adaptation to climate change in at-risk communities is useful, useable, and used, thereby preventing and/or mitigating climate impacts on human health.